Thieves Of Mercy sb-2

by James L. Nelson

  “Very good, Captain. In the meanwhile the ram fleet will proceed downriver and meet up with you when you get down by Randolph.” Ellet held out his hand. The men shook, and Ellet was gone.

  Davis sat again with a sigh. In the meanwhile… Bloody man.

  He looked down at his diary. He had hopes of publishing it one day, when the war was over and he had achieved enough noteworthy accomplishments. He noticed a stack of paper on the edge of his desk. He squinted at it, trying to recall what it was. And then he remembered-the manuscript the Rebel spy had delivered to him.

  He reached for it, smiled as he recalled that singular meeting.

  Send the book to a New York publisher, honest to God!

  But in truth, he still did not know if the big secesh yahoo was serious or not. The Reb had given up a fair amount of intelligence regarding the situation in Memphis, revealed things that might or might not be helpful.

  Not that Davis was starving for information about the enemy. Since the Rebels had instituted a conscription a few months back, deserters had been streaming north, and they all had a story. What the big Reb had said agreed with some accounts Davis had heard, contradicted others. It was hard to know.

  He decided to let them go mostly out of appreciation for the outrageous nature of their story. It had given him hours of amusement, thinking on it and telling the other officers. Nor could the Rebels have gleaned any important information from their visit, even if they were spies. They didn’t learn anything that a person sneaking through the woods on shore with a telescope couldn’t have learned.

  Taking them prisoner would have involved a big brouhaha over their flag of truce and their status at the time of their capture. Davis could envision the tedious correspondence that would result. In the end, it was less bother to just send them away.

  He reached over and picked up the bundle of paper, smudged and dog-eared. He had tossed it on his desk and forgotten it, had not even looked at the title page.

  Mississippi Mike, Melancholy Prince of the River. Davis frowned at the title. Was this a joke? Or were these idiots serious? He set the top page aside and began to read.

  Chapter One-A Ghostly Tale. On the whole of the Mississippi, there is no man who would dare cross Mississippi Mike, best of the riverboat men. And of all of them, you’d reckon it was his kin would know best that the hardest drinkin, hardest fightin man on Western Waters was not a fellow to be done dirty.

  By the end of the first page, Captain Davis was smiling. He read on. Ten minutes later he was laughing out loud.

  During her wild run through Hampton Roads and the Elizabeth River, Wendy Atkins had all but forgotten why she was doing what she was doing. Before, she would not have thought that possible. Risking everything to race across the country into the arms of one’s lover-it was so romantic, she would never have dreamed anything could make her lose sight of that goal. But that was before she had been threatened with hanging or shooting or rape or burning to death.

  Wendy Atkins discovered, during that short and brutal time, that, girlhood fantasies aside, even true love could not take precedence over everything. Wendy nearly forgot her primary objective, but she did not forget it entirely. As she and Molly staggered up the dirt road, leaving the smoldering hulk of the Virginia behind, heading vaguely north toward Richmond, she remembered. Samuel Bowater.

  When Molly finally collapsed at the side of the road, unable to go on after all the blood she had lost from the gunshot wound in her arm, Wendy remembered.

  She dressed Molly’s wounds, made her comfortable, sat with her in the shade by the side of the road. And as Molly slept, Wendy thought of Samuel Bowater, of the look he would have on his face when he saw her, after recovering from the shock of her being there. They would run to one another, wrap their arms around each other, kiss in a brazen and heedless way, careless of what the world thought, because they were in love.

  Of course, Samuel was not generally the brazen and heedless kind, and Wendy was just starting to worry that perhaps he would be too reticent to kiss her in public that way, when she heard the sound of a cart coming up the road. She left Molly where she was, walked back down the road, skirting the side, in case whoever it was coming up was not someone she wished to meet. Despite what she had seen with her own eyes, the specter of Roger Newcomb still floated in her peripheral vision.

  It was not Roger Newcomb, or anyone who might be a threat, but an old cart loaded with a profusion of household goods, a farmer, his wife, their three children, a pig, and sundry chickens in wooden cages. Wendy waved them down.

  “Gettin the hell out of here, afore the Yankees show and take every damned thing we got,” the farmer explained, when Wendy asked where they were bound.

  “We have been trying to do the same. My aunt and me. Oh, we have had a terrible time. My aunt is hurt. Could we beg a ride of you?”

  The farmer followed Wendy to where Molly lay. He had a notion that Molly’s wound looked very much like a gunshot wound, but Wendy explained that it was from a broken sapling on which Molly had torn her flesh when she tripped and fell.

  The farmer looked hard at Wendy. Finally he spat a stream of tobacco on the ground. “All right, whatever you say,” he said. “Let’s git her on the wagon.”

  It was not a comfortable ride, but it was better than walking, and the farmer took them to a place where they could catch a train to Richmond.

  Molly slept a good deal of the time, but when she was awake she was lucid, and she told Wendy of a place in Richmond, the home of a friend, where they would be safe. It took them forty torturous hours of travel, rattling along on trains, waiting on benches at depots while the soldiers took precedence, jamming onto trolleys, before they finally arrived at Molly’s friend’s home, where they were welcomed in like family. Wendy felt as if she had been forty years in the desert, but now it was over.

  She stayed for a week, sleeping when she could, between dreams that made her bolt upright, kicking at the bedclothes, cold with sweat. She tended to her aunt, whose recuperation was slow but steady. She helped in the kitchen when she had the strength. For a week she rested, recuperated, and then she knew it was time to go.

  “Molly,” Wendy said, hesitant; she did not know how to broach it.

  “You want to go to your sailor boy?”

  “Yes.”

  Molly smiled at her, brushed the hair from her face. “You are a very different woman than you were the first time you set out on that mission.”

  Wendy nodded. Molly sighed. “I’m too battered to go on,” she said. “A week or two, perhaps, but not now. Part of surviving is knowing when you must stop. But you are much younger than I am, and stronger. And now I know you’ll be safe.”

  Wendy was surprised, but she hid it. She had expected an argument from Molly, along the lines of “Now you know what can happen…” but in fact her aunt’s response was very much the opposite.

  She left the next day. Some money in her carpetbag, the bulk of it down the front of her dress, her pistol strapped to her thigh, she set out with none of the trepidation or uncertainty that she had felt in the carriage house in Portsmouth, packing her things. She bid farewell to Molly. Their host took her in his carriage to the railroad depot.

  She waited five hours there for a train, reading back issues of the Richmond Whig and the Despatch, reading the reporters’ versions of the historic events she had just witnessed.

  It was a long and exhausting eleven days of travel, west toward the Mississippi River. Terrible food, sleepless nights, excruciating delays. At several points she had to walk or beg a ride from one railhead to another because the lines did not connect. At other times she had to take a room in a hotel because the train was delayed for some reason-tracks washed out or torn up, engine broken down, cars diverted-and no one had any idea when it might arrive.

  She wondered if the Yankee rail system was in such a shambles, and she had the sinking feeling that no, it was nothing like this. The shopkeepers in the North would keep their t
rains running on time.

  Worst of all were the ribald suggestions of men who assumed a woman traveling unescorted as she was had to be earning her way across country in some manner, and they were willing to give her a job of work. There were times when she wanted to pull the pistol out of its secret holster and jam the barrel into some leering face, just for the satisfaction of seeing the lust dissolve into fear. But she resisted, and managed to satisfy herself with a few cutting words.

  It was monotonous, irritating, unpleasant, uncomfortable, but it was a Sunday church picnic compared to the few days it had taken her to get free of Norfolk, and she never once even thought to complain.

  Eleven long days, and then she was there.

  It was midafternoon when the train arrived at the station and Wendy stood on protesting muscles, stretched as delicately as she was able, and retrieved her carpetbag. She stepped out into a beautiful day, bright and warm. She could smell the nearby river, the pungent smell of late spring flowers. She was there, after all she had endured she was there, and the elation was unlike any she had ever felt.

  The fresh air was welcome after the train car, which reeked of tobacco smoke and too many people in too tight and warm a space.

  Wendy crossed the platform and pushed her way into the station. She did not imagine that anyone there would know Samuel Bowater by name, but she hoped perhaps someone might know where the navy men were employed. It seemed a wanton question, but Wendy had already left the bonds of propriety way behind, so she steeled herself and asked the ticket man.

  “Oh, sure, ain’t a soul here doesn’t know that. They’re pretty near heroes, ’round here. You just follow the River Road south an… well, hell… Tom! Come over here. This here lady needs a ride down to the shipyard.”

  Tom, an old black man in an old black sack coat, nodded, smiled, took up Wendy’s carpetbag. He led her out of the station to an old buckboard just outside the door, a tired horse standing in the traces. He set a crate on the ground for her to step on, then joined her on the seat, shook the reins, and the horse stepped off.

  They rolled through the streets and then along the wide river, and Tom kept up a running narrative of everything they had done in town to prepare for defense, how the Yankee navy was closing in, but how they would be ready.

  Wendy listened with half an ear while she took in the sight of the strange town. She had only been out of Virginia twice in her life, and once was just to Maryland and the other to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to see Samuel Bowater. This was so different, so exciting-the travel, the new places, the reckless way she had run off to be with her love-it was absolutely intoxicating.

  At last the shipyard came into view, a bustle of activity, men swarming around like ants on a hill of spilled sugar. Wendy felt her pulse race, felt a tingling in her hands and feet. After all this time and suffering, would she be reunited with Samuel Bowater, here, in the next five minutes? Would she have the courage to kiss him the way she had dreamed? She was not so certain now.

  Tom pulled the buckboard to a stop, made to get out to help her down, but she leaped to the ground before he could even rise out of his seat.

  “Thank you, Tom!” She handed him a coin.

  “Thank you, ma’am! You enjoy you time wid you husband, now!” He tipped his hat and drove on.

  Wendy took a few steps toward the yard and stopped. She looked over the men working there, but none of them was Samuel. Not that she would have expected him to be swinging a hammer or hauling on a saw.

  A young officer standing in the yard glanced her way, glanced again, then approached. Wendy waited for him. “Ma’am, may I help you?” He was wearing the uniform of a navy lieutenant.

  “Perhaps. I am looking for Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, of the Confederate States Navy.”

  “Lieutenant Samuel Bowater…” The lieutenant looked away, screwed up his face. “Name doesn’t ring a bell, ma’am.”

  “I was under the impression he was here,” Wendy insisted.

  “Could be. It’s not as if I know everyone. Let me take you to the captain.”

  The lieutenant, whose name was George Gift, graciously took Wendy’s bag and led her across the yard to a small wooden building, more of an overlarge shed, which served as the yard’s office. He led her inside, introduced her to a man seated behind one of two desks there, flowing with papers.

  “Sir, perhaps you can help this lady,” he said.

  The man stood, gave a shallow bow. “Lieutenant Isaac Brown, ma’am. How may I be of assistance?”

  “Lieutenant, I am Wendy Atkins. I am looking for a navy lieutenant named Samuel Bowater.”

  Brown said, “Hmmm,” and he squinted. “Bowater…?” he said, unsure.

  The man at the other desk in the room, who had not looked up from the journal in which he was writing, looked up now. “Bowater? Sure, I know him,” he said. “He was the one got command of the Tennessee.”

  “Tennessee?” Wendy asked. She had heard nothing of that.

  “Ah!” Brown said, as if all were explained. “That’s why you can’t find him. The Tennessee is still up in Memphis. It was only this ship, the Arkansas, that was towed down here to Yazoo City.”

  The Yankees were coming downriver. They were wasting no time. The River Defense Fleet dropped down ahead of them. By the light of the full moon and the huge bonfire that was once the gunboat Tennessee , the makeshift men-of-war tied up to the levee that lined the Memphis waterfront.

  Confusion swept like a nasty rumor through the fleet; uncertainty was the only thing they knew for certain. The troops from Forts Pillow and Randolph had been sent away, there were no soldiers to defend the city. Was the fleet to make a stand? Try to hold the Yankees at bay? For how long? Were there reinforcements of any kind on the way? Or should the fleet preserve itself, make a stand farther downriver?

  No one seemed to know. No one knew if anyone else knew, or if those decisions had even been made. The general feeling in the fleet was that they would not fight, that preserving the Confederacy’s last waterborne fighting force on the Mississippi was more important than trying to hold on to Memphis, which would be lost eventually, no matter what they did.

  “So, there will be no fight?” Bowater asked. Dragging himself back from Shirley’s yard, exhausted, dispirited, he had met Tarbox up on the hurricane deck. The first mate was leaning on the rail, staring upriver.

  “Reckon not. Feller on the Colonel Lovell, he told me we was gonna head downriver tonight. ’Course it don’t look like that’s gonna happen, so I don’t know what the hell now. Ain’t heard a thing from anyone who could actually make a damn decision, so I don’t know what to tell you, Cap’n.”

  “I see.” Bowater considered sending Tarbox over to the flag boat, but decided against it. It would remind those in command that Sullivan was still out of commission, and that might make someone overly curious. Besides, it was even money that they did not know on the flag boat what they were going to do, anymore than anyone else did.

  Just wait and see… Lord, after all his years in the service, it was one thing Bowater knew how to do.

  “Word is, them Yankees is laid on Paddy’s Hen and Chickens,” Tarbox added.

  Bowater had no idea what he meant. He wondered if that was some kind of river man’s insult. “Paddy’s Hen and Chickens?”

  “Right up there.” Tarbox gestured upriver with his chin. “Little cluster of islands, right at the bend of the river, ’bout a mile an a half above the city. Called ‘Paddy’s Hen and Chickens.’ Picket boat brung word, them ironclads is tied up there. If it was daylight, we could see ’em from here.”

  Bowater nodded. Two fleets within sight of one another, and no one knew what would happen next. Something, anyway. Make a stand or skedaddle, whichever it was, something would happen tomorrow. “If we don’t hear from the flag boat before, let’s have all hands at quarters an hour before dawn, and a full head up steam,” Bowater said.

  “Yessuh,” Tarbox said, and though he drawled the
words, there was a note of approval there as well.

  “And get some sleep, Mr. Tarbox. I certainly intend to.”

  The best laid plans…, Bowater thought as he lay in his bunk, sleepless, staring at the shadows made by the moonlight on the overhead. How many twists and turns had his life taken in the past year? After fourteen years of near stagnation in the United States Navy, he had, in one year of warfare, more than made up for that monotony.

  A little monotony would not be so bad, he thought. But he knew he would not get that anytime soon. Certainly not in the morning.

  He thought of Wendy. Where was she? He had sent her several letters during the last week of April and the first week of May, telling her all about Memphis, the Tennessee, the River Defense Fleet, the Battle of Plum Point. The things he knew she would not really care about. And he also told her how much he loved her, missed her, wished he could hold her in his arms once again. The things she would want to hear.

  He mailed them to her address in Portsmouth, the only one he had, and he never received a word in reply. He could only guess that she had returned to Culpepper and her mail was not being forwarded, or that his letters had not arrived at all. There were other possibilities, of course, but none that he cared to think about.

  It was now June sixth, with midnight an hour past. Almost a month since the Yankees had taken Portsmouth and Norfolk and ended the hope of even a letter from Wendy. If she had not gotten out ahead of them, she was now behind enemy lines.

  Where is she? What is she doing? he wondered. And as he did, he fell asleep.

  After some time, someone shook him awake, and none too gently. His limbs were stiff and his eyes stung from too little sleep. His cabin was partially illuminated by a single lantern hung from a hook.

  “Three in the morning. Hour to sunrise,” Tarbox’s voice sounded in the dark.

  “Thank you, Mr. Tarbox.” Bowater swung his legs off the bunk, rubbed his eyes. He heard the click of the door as Tarbox left.

  Samuel gave himself five minutes to collect his thoughts. He said a prayer, which he was not much in the habit of doing, and only by asking for help for everyone but himself was he able to avoid feeling like the world’s biggest hypocrite. Then he stood, strapped on his belt and holster with his engraved.36 Colt, pulled on his frock coat, set his cap on his head and stepped out into the predawn dark.